Posted
by
msmash
on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @11:40AM
from the rip-windows-phone dept.

From a report: Microsoft is killing off Windows Phone 8.1 support today, more than three years after the company first introduced the update. The end of support marks an end to the Windows Phone era, and the millions of devices still running the operating system. While most have accepted that the death of Windows Phone occurred more than a year ago, AdDuplex estimates that nearly 80 percent of all Windows-powered phones are still running Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8, or Windows Phone 8.1. All of these handsets are now officially unsupported, and only 20 percent of all Windows phones are running the latest Windows 10 Mobile OS.

But they never would have been first. The iPhone was a fundamental reimagining of the mobile phone, a generational change. After the iPhone razed the landscape of clunky, carrier controlled phones, others, like Android and Windows phone, were able to step into the new world. The iPhone was the big bang of mobility devices.

But they never would have been first. The iPhone was a fundamental reimagining of the mobile phone, a generational change. After the iPhone razed the landscape of clunky, carrier controlled phones, others, like Android and Windows phone, were able to step into the new world. The iPhone was the big bang of mobility devices.

That's not entirely true. There was the IBM Simon and the Palm Pilot phones and blackberries before iPhone. There were also other "dumb" phones that could run apps. I had one that predated iPhone.

Apple were just the first to put a really solid device together that worked well and appealed to a large market.

It's not impossible to believe that someone at Microsoft could have thought "Let's make a better version of the Palm Pilot Phone" before Apple had the idea... they just didn't. Or if they did, the stupidity of the MS management squashed the idea until it was too late.

I think Apple's big breakthrough was that it was all screen. Until that point every PDA Phone was half keyboard, half screen and on the iPhone you had a "giant" screen which seemed even bigger and more useful with pinch zoom and scrolling.

The difference is the simplified interface. Although you could buy a date book/organizer from e.g. SHARP which had an interface that simple for years before the iPhone came out, and even Palm used a simplified interface, Microsoft chose to go fully complex with their mobile interface and it sucked.

There was the IBM Simon and the Palm Pilot phones and blackberries before iPhone.

1994 to early 00s, that's a huge gap there. You fail to mention Nokia's GEOS-based 9000 Communicator, launched in 1996. It was perhaps the first commercially successful smartphone, and the first mobile device to do web browsing with graphics.

Yes. And more importantly, they correctly anticipated that the emergence of ubiquitous multimedia-capable phones was the biggest threat to standalone MP3 players. So they beat everyone else to the punch and put out an iPod-killer. A lot of companies would've sat on their laurels and resisted cannibalizing their own sales.

It's hard to imagine that kind of boldness and confidence of direction from them today. I miss Jobs' Apple.

Pretty sure there were Windows CE based smartphones as well that predate the iPhone.

Indeed there were - I had two!
They demonstrated all that has killed the Windows Phone today - and more!

The software looked good, and had the features expected of Windows of its day: There was never enough ROM or RAM, it kept locking up or rebooting itself or needing re-boots - which deinstalled all your apps!

And there were some extras, familiar to today's WinPhone users: It had few apps from third parties, and no bu

I could cut and paste on my Samsung Blackjack running Windows Mobile 5 (5.5 I believe is what it had when I got it) and Windows Mobile 6 later.

I could browse the real internet, get real email, and even download and manage files. Over bluetooth, I connected to a GPS receiver and got live turn-by-turn navigation from a third-party application. I could get games (I only got a few), I could watch all sorts of video formats, I had a real fucking keyboard, I had customizable shortcut keys, it was easy to hack a

For whatever reason, Microsoft was just never able to get mobile right.

Totally agree - I'm floored by all the comments claiming MS was late. But I believe what they missed was apps. I agree with the other fond memories of WM mentioned. I remember, despite seriously hating MS, I thought in 2006, "Wow, they got this WM 5.x pretty right, this is the wave of the future. It's just a pain to install software. They need something like apt-get." How many years did MS sit on it's butt before Apple came out with a technically inferior phone, with the exception of the app store?

You're underestimating how out-of-this-worldly easy to use the iPhone was for the common population. The iPhone was a smartphone that just fucking worked (as cliched as it sounds). iOS 1.0 didn't even include an app store. It was that browsing the web with Safari was almost as comfortable as doing it on a PC, excepting the obvious differences in form factors.

Windows Mobile 6.5 was DOS-like in comparison. Obviously designed for an era other than of readily available processing power.

I wouldn't go that far. I'd say it was Windows 98-like in comparison. That's still a pretty spectacularly crap interface compared to the iPhone, though. The pathetic thing though is that we had LCD organizers before either one existed which had an iPhone-like interface with an ultra-simple launcher, apps always taking up the full screen and the like, but Microsoft still felt that phones needed to have an interface just as complex and powerful as a PC in spite of the drastically lesser screen real estate.

In fairness to Microsoft, Apple didn't understand the importance of apps at first either. They didn't even allow third parties to create them. In terms of apps, the difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Apple figured out and adapted to the reality of the business rather quickly.

a. Microsoft is not hip. You need to be hip to sell phones because like movies the sales are driven by what teenagers buy.

b. Microsoft, for whatever reason, refused to give rank and file phone salesmen a spiff. So if I went into a Sprint/AT&T/T-Mobile/Whatever and bought an iPhone or Android that salesmen got a few bucks. He/she got nothing for a Windows phone. So they were promptly relegated to the bottom of a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory behind a sign marked 'beware of leopard'.

They were too late to the game. If they had been first they probably would have been the standard.

They were very early to the game. They were there way, way before iOS and Android. They could have owned the market. But, they failed. Ignominiously. Abjectly. As it behooves the despicable company that they have always been. And thank goodness for that.

I don't think there would have been any monopoly, and besides, Microsoft no longer has even a desktop monopoly. Apple has quite a viable alternative, and if they introduced a few Macs in the $500 range, they'd be good to go. Chromebooks too - if they dropped the requirement that everything has to be on 'the cloud' and provided some w/ adequate storage, they'd be pretty good as well.

Chromebooks too - if they dropped the requirement that everything has to be on 'the cloud' and provided some w/ adequate storage, they'd be pretty good as well.

They're doing that already. Newer Chromebooks run Android apps, which can all use local storage. It isn't a great solution by any means at least until apps that leverage the screen, the keyboard and the mouse start appearing, but it's being done.

The real issue that I see, is that the Windows Phone didn't bring anything to the table. It was just a Me Too attempt.The Market was already dominated by Apple as the design that other base after. And Android was the alternative that worked on all the non-apple devices.Google beat Microsoft to the rest of the devices game.

If Microsoft brought something good to the table, Support for native x86 windows applications? or just better cross platform support. That may had been enough to change the market.

That is something all of the Apple haters tend to forget. Apple is a hardware company. The make money from slick expensive hardware, not from user data.Their software is very cheap for what it does, actually, unlike Microsoft.

They do NOT sell user data like Google or Facebook because it is not part of their business model. Which is the main reason I use my iPhone even though I like my Windows Phone more.

Strangely, this puts Apple at a disadvantage in the big neurocomputing AI thing that seems to be coming o

I have a Nokia running Win8 (not enough memory to upgrade to Win10). It's by far the favorite phone I've ever owned, much preferable to the Androids I used to own (YMMV, and no, I've never put out the $ for an iPhone). But I would part with my precious Nokia for, oh, say, $1000 (which would allow me to upgrade to a newer Windows phone).

No, upto Windows 7, the logo was a flag, so smashed panes couldn't have happened there. Windows 8 was where MS made the decision to replace the flag w/ a trapezoidal window, and that's where you might have seen it, since the Metro interface (as it was then called) was an UI disaster, being so radically different from Windows 7

My coworker has a new Windows phone. He likes it. If you don't need a million apps then it's not a bad product. The UI I think is pretty nice; what fails on the desktop works on the phone.

However, it's not dead because even the summary says there's a still Windows 10 phone. All that died was the previous version. That in itself should be the story, the Microsoft is accelerating the planned obsolescence in their rush to emulate Apple. But it's not dead. I know it's a Slashdot meme to declare things dead at the first sign of sniffles, but sheesh...

Yea, it's just the official end of mainstream support. Reality is WP8.1's last update was early to mid 2015. With this though, more apps will lose support and possibly stop working. While the OS worked quite well, third party support really dropped badly in the last couple of years, and from the position where it was, i.e. not very well supported to begin with, it just went dire for the platform.

More precisely, Windows Phone/Mobile is fine for work: it has Office, OneNote & Outlook coming w/ it, and along w/ Calendar & Maps, it's ideal for use as a business/work phone. Yeah, you're out of luck if you want Snapchat or Pokemon Go: however, there are a few other apps that still work, such as Fandango, which is still supported. The calculator is awesome: features not just a calculator w/ different modes, but also unit conversions. Toss in a currency converter, and they'd be all set.

However, it's not dead because even the summary says there's a still Windows 10 phone.

It's dead. Apps in the app store are not updated, my banking apps are being phased out, for Win10.
Also, build quality has become gradually worse from the label Nokia to Microsoft. Apps (e.g. whatsapp) becoming worse, more app quirks.
Last buy was a Lumia 640, great value, great battery.
I found winphone a great improvement to Android 4 but will be returning to Android reluctantly.

Meanwhile, Darl McBride, the owner of the intellectual property rights to the Windows Phonery, has announced that the Windows Phone is "not quite dead yet", and "thinks he'll take the Windows Phone out for a walk."

Owners of iPhones and Android phones will still be able to use their devices, provided they pay the Elusive Useless Litigation Acquiescence of $1,399 to cover the iPhone and Android infringement on the Windows Phone technology. McBride plans to use the influx of funds to finance yet even more li

All phones are not upgradeable to Windows 10 Mobile. I tried it w/ a Lumia 520 I once had, but the system requirements clearly stated that it was not possible.

Microsoft should make Windows 10 Mobile something like Android Marshmallow, so that people can swap the definitions of primary & secondary storage, then pop a 128GB SD card into any old Windows phone, define that as the main memory, and then install Windows 10 Mobile on that, and re-define the 8/16/32GB internal memory as external storage.

The usual story with MS: Enter the market too late, rely on their dominance of the general user desktop market (decreasing with tablets and phones), and hoping a marketing/hype effort will be enough to compensate.IE/Edge is another example. The only question now is, between the heavyweight 'A' players. (Android and Apple) which will dominate the market. (or perhaps a fork of Android)

When Firefox (and later Chrome) hit the market and started decimating their market share, the just said "meh, businesses still love us." By the time they woke up, all they could do was damage control. Now they bitch and whine about how "browser monocultures" are the worst thing ever.

Actually, now that you make that analogy, it seems spot on. MS's approach has been to target 'enterprise' with their mobile products once it became clear the consumer attempt wasn't going anywhere (around 2013-2014). I've been quite sceptical about the strategy of targeting enterprise only, because the rise of the smartphone was decided by consumers, not enterprise. Browser wars appear to have gone in the same direction, while I'm purely an observer, it appears to me that even enterprise has been moving fro

You skipped an important aspect of the story: the people who would otherwise be at the vanguard, the Microsoft fanatics, aren't interested. They thought Microsoft was serious about Pocked PC 2000, then it was abandoned. Then Windows Mobile, and then it was dropped. Then Windows Phone 7 was important. Then it was dropped. Then Windows Phone 8...

I still think MS probably should have purchased RIM and re-introduced the Blackberry and BES. Blackberry was the enterprise phone for a long time, and it seemed like a natural fit back when Microsoft was courting Nokia in 2013. BB was on life support back then, but still had its fans.

Yeah, that OS might have been more successful had it remained in Nokia's hands. Microsoft could have bought off RIM and integrated their features into Windows 10 Mobile, which incidentally is what Windows Phone should have been like.

Had Nokia kept it, there could have been 2 stores - one Microsoft's, one Nokia's, and there would have been more of an incentive to buy those

I was working for Nokia Mobile Phones when MS took it over. A week before the deal was complete, MS said that everyone would be kept on. Two weeks after the deal was complete, they laid off 20,000 of us! Yeah. MS is a predator! We were a division of Nokia that was serving over 100 million customers world-wide...

I have a Lumia 928 with Windows Phone 8.1 and once it dies, I might not get another phone. Android and iOS are still clunky messes. For as much as Microsoft gets wrong, sometimes they get things right; and I think WP 8.1 on Nokia designed hardware was one of those moments.

Headline does not match summary. Windows Phones running 8.x are now unsupported, but Windows Phones running 10.x are still around and supported. Headline should be "Windows Phone OS 8.x unsupported as of today"

Microsoft thought they could hijack Nokia's passionate fanbase. But those people were hyped for MeeGo, so when that died, everyone was furious. So you could say that WP didn't merely start from zero, it started from a huge negative number: millions of people who hated it by default.

It's why Microsoft bought Xamarin, a cross-platform mobile environment, and made free. It's also why they have been helping Unity3D so much. They are trying to make developing for Windows on Mobile super cheap, to the point of one additional checkbox in the "Export to all platforms" dialogs.

The thing that really killed Windows mobile was when they killed the first version, Windows Mobile 6. Like always with microsoft development there is a big upfront investment to be certified.

Developers who made that investment in WM6 were soon disappointed when MS changed the platform entirely and effectively neutered the return these developers invested in the platform. Since developers aren't stupid it was hard to see anyone investing in the new platform. Once bitten, twice shy.

So MS shot themselves in the foot with their mobile strategy by doing this to early adopters. Why would any developer invest their time in a company that did this to them.

I think the real problem was that they didn't spend enough time with.NET on wince before making the switch. Developers didn't take up.NET in sufficient numbers to make it work by that time, in part because.NET on wince was shit. The devices didn't have enough power to run.NET apps.

Competition is good, however it's not worth picking an inferior choice just for the sake of competition, the competition needs to be able to compete on it's own merits.

To be blunt, Despite the massive marketing push by MS that put these at the forefront of every carrier's store, discounted them to effectively free, and pushed them on every TV show and movie, nobody was willing to put up with Windows Phone.

I also don't use Firefox because it isn't the best choice. I do however use Linux on the desktop, becau

Strange, I switched from an Android phone to a Windows 8 phone several years ago, and found the Windows phone's interface far more intuitive, easy to use, lacking bloatware (and no warnings that my phone would stop working when I tried to uninstall a piece of said bloatware). In short, I find the Win8 interface much better than the Android.